Guardian Angels
by eoraptor
Summary: ONESHOT: A love story, a rescue, a tale to be told.


"**Guardian Angels"**

By Eoraptor

AN Kim Possible and all related characters are © 2002-2007 Walt Disney Company. These characters are used under fair use, not for profit, by the author. Rated T for language and situations.

* * *

Tommy was racing down the highway, eager to get to Makeout Ridge for his date. He was so eager, in fact, that he had used his dad's SSR code to override the speed limiters in the car and break the speed limit. The boy was on a mission.

And of course, it was raining, which meant that the picnic blanket he had packed would be of little sue, but hey, this was a full sized minivan… all he had to do was fold down the back seat and maybe…

And too late he saw it… an elk, standing right in the middle of the Middleton Canyon Bridge. The van saw it too, and the computer engaged all of its brakes and its restraints, yanking him tightly into the seat even as he tried to steer away from the big dangerous animal and assisting in controlling the speeding minivan.

Unfortunately, neither he nor the computer saw, in the heavy rain, the pothole that was under the centerline of the roadway. It was a big one. Big enough to grab some part of the undercarriage of the van and completely defeat both his and the computer's efforts to avoid the collision, sending the van careening into the other lane of traffic, around the elk, and smashing into the guard rail. The van being as tall as it was, and the bridge having been built sometime in the middle of the previous century, the problems only multiplied from there as part of the guard rail buckled and fell away into the canyon below, leaving the bright purple minivan leaning out into space on two wheels.

Things had only been getting worse because before the guard-railing had given way, it had smashed the accelerometer and antenna in the front of the van, cutting off the computer from the outside world and disabling the sensors that would have told it that the van had come to a stop and it could loosen the seatbelt. As such, Tommy had been dragged along for the wild ride, and smacked his head on the one spot in the van which was not protected by airbags, the metal bar that held the headrest up.

It took the teen a few minutes to look up from his stunned state, and realize that he was not looking at a dead elk or a shattered windshield; but instead the ninety-some feet of empty space over the edge of the bridge down to the storm-swollen river below. The shattered guard rail could just be seen from this height, pointing up at the minivan like a rusty dagger from where it had lodged in the riverbed below.

Tommy tugged at the seatbelt, only to find it jammed in its tightest position, holding him in the seat unrelentingly. And with his body twisted as it was from the impact, he couldn't reach the release for it no matter how much he tried to grab the edge of the driver's seat. That and any movement he made seemed to rock the van precipitously over the edge of the bridge.

He reached up and pushed the OnPlanet button on the mirror, which he could reach… only for it to give three short beeps, indicating no signal.

Tommy hung his head, sighing darkly, realizing what a spot he was in because he was in such a hurry to meet Anya up on the ridge. The teen was so depressed and panicked that it took him a few minutes to realize what he though was the van rocking on the edge of the bridge was actually someone knocking on the window.

About the time he realized someone was trying to get his attention, they got tired of trying, and the window smashed in, spattering him with broken safety glass. And letting in the rain and wind of course.

"I've got the van, Princess, but I smell gas… get his ass out of there!"

Shaking his head, trying to clear it again, he looked out into the rain and saw a drenched woman, not much older than him, holding some kind of hair dryer in her hand. She had used it to smash in the window. Now she was putting it… a hairdryer, back into some kind of holster on her hip, and reaching in to him past the deflated airbag over the window beam.

"Hold on, we'll get you out of there… can you reach the seatbelt?"

Tommy knew he must have a concussion. Because all he could do was stare at the woman and marvel at how, even in the rain and wind, her hair could be such a brilliant red and her shirt such a deep and colorful purple. Finally, he shook his head dumbly, and showed by flapping his arm, that he couldn't turn far enough in his tightly constrained position to reach the button.

"Crud! Where is Ron and his luck when you need him? I need a set of claws up here!"

The van rocked sickeningly, and the redhead disappeared, replaced by a woman who must be suffering the effects of the storm. She was deathly pale and her long black hair was matted all down her back from what Tommy could see in his bound position.

"Alright slick… lean back so I don't cut up that pretty face… On your way to go and try to get laid up on the ridge, weren't ya?"

"So not the time, dear… get him out, cause I'm not strong enough to hold onto this thing like you."

Tommy tried to turn to see the voice of the redhead from somewhere behind, but he was shoved roughly into the seat. The next thing he knew, he felt four knife blades slice cleanly through the belt, and his shirt , and he inhaled sharply hoping to prevent them cutting anything else, like his abdomen.

Without the belt to support him in the half-suspended minivan, the teenager dropped forward into the steering wheel, setting off the horn and setting it to rocking harder.

"Crud! It's gonna go! Get him out of there!"

"Working on it, Cupcake. But the doofus has cracked his mellon and he isn't exactly helping out here!"

Tommy was pretty sure he'd just been insulted by the pale woman, but he was seeing stars, and smelling gasoline, so he decided to let it slide past. He yelped when he felt his arm get grabbed by an impossibly strong grip, and he was yanked free of the wounded minivan, the head-impact airbag coming with him as he was pulled free.

"Baby! The gasoline! When this thing goes the sparks are gonna light it up worse than you!"

"I'm on it Princess, just get back!"

The stunned teen looked up. The pale woman in the long green coat gave what could only be described as a titanic kick. The upset minivan leapt into the air above the shattered railing. Free of the edge of the bridge, Tommy watched in slow motion as it slid away, gravity taking hold again. Finally the back bumper caught the broken railing and indeed a spark went up.

Liquid fire chased the plummeting minivan down through the air along a trail of streaming gasoline, until the vehicle plunged into the storm swollen river below, smashed and impaled on the spar of aged railing that had gone down a few minutes before. A second later the fire caught up to the smashed van, and it exploded with enough force to reverberate in the chests of the three people on the bridge almost a hundred feet above.

Tommy let the redhead help him to a safer section of unbroken railing, and he sat himself down with a wet and heavy thud on the concrete, not yet able to muster the breath for a thanks. Only a moment later he was blinded by headlights as someone came from the opposite edge of the bridge. Shielding his eyes, he tried to wave with his free hand in the rain, so as not to be run down after just escaping the previous catastrophe.

"Tommy?"

That was Anya's voice! He recognized the thick Russian accent even in the single word from his immigrant girlfriend.

Her brilliant red sports car, with its iconic and ironic hammer and sickle on the hood, squealed to a much more controlled stop near the shattered guard rail, and the two teens were reunited in a wet embrace in the dwindling rain as the storm began to pass.

"How in zee hell did you escape zhat?" Anya held him tightly, and looked from the spot he was standing in to the shattered bridge edge, now illuminated from below by the gasoline fire in the canyon. "You eediot! You are lucky American Cars are such nannies… in Soviet Russia, car throws you over cliff to save itself!"

"Well, these girls dragged me out before it went over…" Tommy shivered against her, a combination of the cold rain and the adrenaline in his body as he gestured within her grasp.

"Vhat… girls?"

"These two…" Tommy looked up, only to find that the redhead and the black-haired woman had vanished. In fact, the only evidence they had been there at all were the four claw-like slashes in his shirt.

_**-M.A.-**_

An hour later found Tommy, wrapped up in a heavy police-issue blanket in the back of an ambulance, giving a statement about the accident to Sheriff Kredible.

"So, you all are saying that a redhead and a brunette yanked you out of a van…" She began, a dangerous edge dripping from her usual cowboy drawl, "And then kicked that there van down into the canyon before it could explode. Then they disappeared before yer girl got here to find you…"

Tommy nodded but couldn't speak. He might be seventeen, and a captain on the Middleton football team, but the nearly seventy year old county sheriff, boney and gray haired as she was, scared the shit out of him right now with the glare in her blue-green eyes.

"The redhead was in a purple tunic, and had some kinda hair dryer hangin' from her belt… and the brunette was pale an' in an alligator skin jacket?" She stopped tapping away at her tablet as she glared.

Tommy wasn't exactly sure when he had said that the long green jacket was alligator skin, but he must have for the long-limbed sheriff to know. He nodded once again, shivering against Anya.

"Bull. Shit." The grizzled law-woman spat disgustedly. "Deputy… you deal with this… brat… Ah got paperwork to sort out. The EPA hates it when minivans explode in rivers."

As Sheriff Jocelyn Kredible climbed out of the back of the ambulance, her deputy and daughter, and Middleton's resident substitute teacher, Susan Kredible-Barkin, climbed in. Tommy relaxed visibly… Jocelyn Kredible scared the living hell out of him… the worst Mrs. Barkin could do was assign extra homework.

"Alright you." The deputy/teacher sighed and shook the rain from her foul weather coat, "You're lucky that she's tired. She hates it when you kids use that old ghost story for drag racing down the bridge."

"Vhat… story?" Anya blinked. "Tommy sez that two women rescued him from explodink minivan. How could he drag race American minivan?"

Mrs. Barkin blinked. "So he wasn't racing you in that hot little number of yours? I'll admit it sounded stupid to me too but…"

Tommy was getting a little indignant about all of this now. He was cold and wet; and now he was being called a liar. He was about to respond when his hot tempered Russian girlfriend beat him to it.

"Ov course not! Tommy vas comink to meet me up on make-out ridges. We all heard somethink on the bridge and heard some flashink lights and squealink tires, but figured it vas just people racing on zhe bridge. Zhen ve heard his horn honking and honking, and zhen a minute later the fireball from his van explodink in canyon. I raced down here to find him sitting in rain on edge of zhe bridge like I said!"

Mrs. Barkin had to take her word for it at this point. Anya was a college senior at Middleton Institute of Technology, and for her to admit she had been planning to do things with a teenage boy up on make out ridge was borderline felonious. Far worse than just the car accident and drag racing she was 'supposedly' covering up for. "I see… So, Tommy, you really did see the redhead and the brunette?"

"Of course I did!" the teen boy finally snapped, yanking open the heavy blanket and revealing his slashed shirt, "How the heck do you think I got these? The pale woman used some kind of knife on my seat belt that had four or five blades on it!"

A moment of silence passed as the last drizzles of the storm pattered on the ambulance roof, and Tommy realized he seemed to have shocked his teacher, "Mrs. Barkin? Is everything okay? You look like you've seen a-,"

"I'll… I'll be right back…"

The two teens watched the deputy/teacher leave the back of the ambulance. She returned a few moments later with an evidence bag. It looked very old and wrinkled, as though it had been trotted out many times rather than being a fresh find.

"Tommy… does this look like the… knives… Sh- she might have used?"

Eyeing the apparently shell-shocked woman, Tommy took the plastic bag from her and looked at it. Inside was a neon green glove. It was tipped on each finger with what had once been black razor sharp claws; but they were deformed and dulled, their paint scrapped mostly off by being dragged though something rough and heavy.

"Well, it seems like it… but hers were new, they sliced through my seat belt and my shirt like it was nothing." Tommy continued to look at the glove.

When he turned it over to the palm side, he gasped, because the fingers and palm were spattered brown, which he knew was dried blood. Except that he wasn't cut, nor was the glove.

"Missus Barkin… Vhat did you mean by a ghost story?" Anya looked up from the glove, beginning to think something was going on here that she and Tommy were not being told about.

With a deep, bone weary sigh, Deputy Kredible-Barkin shook her head and looked around. Seeing her sheriff was nowhere in sight, she closed the back door of the ambulance. "What do you two know about the lost lovers of the lane?"

"Zhe Lost Lovers of…" Anya frowned, chewing on lips painted black and pink. The term seemed familiar to her, but she had only been in town a few years herself.

"You mean the old kiddy story about the two women who got killed out here like, fifty years ago when the dam broke?"

"It's not a story…" the deputy sighed, "My mother knew them."

_**-M.A.-**_

"_Got a hit on the site, Kim."_

_Kim looked up, and sighed. She was exhausted. It had been over a week since she had seen her girlfriend, who had gone off on some kind of private mission, and it had left her having to run missions all by herself, since Ron and Yori were expecting their first child any day now. _

_With a bone weary groan, she got out of bed and started to pull her purple tunic on, ignoring Wade's eyes and the storm threatening outside. She realized a moment later that Wade had been silent instead of his usual rattling off of what was needed._

"_Alright, what's the big stinking sitch, Wade?"_

"_Well, I hate to tell you this… now… but…"_

"_Oh for cripes's sakes!" the tired redhead snapped at her wrist com as she yanked up her pants with her free hand, "Spit it out already!"_

"_The hit says that a pale green woman has been plotting to blow up the damn at Middleton Canyon. She wants to wash out the bridge as some important convoy goes across."_

_The only words that registered were "pale green woman". Kim had been fighting a rumor campaign for weeks by some right-wing radicals on FairNews that she was covering for Shego, who was secretly still a criminal even five years after her pardon. It had made her question Shego's actions to the woman._

_Her girlfriend had lashed out, not understanding that Kim only wanted to know so that she could silence the critics with cold hard facts. But the recriminations flew and her love refused to answer, and now Shego was gone for more than a week, claiming she had a mission of her own and needed space. _

"_I… I see…" Kim bit her lower lip hard. "And the source?"_

"_Global Justice. Their analysts say it's ninety-nine percent certain" Wade looked sick at having to deliver the news. "They even have footage from a recon mission."_

_Before Kim could object, Wade flashed pictures of a tall pale woman in a green alligator skin coat standing at the foot of the dam and at the foot of the bridge. They were all from behind; but there was, for Kim, no mistaking the form of her life partner in her infamous Club Banana green jacket._

_She sat down heavily on the bed, clutching her midsection, even though that was not the part of her that felt like it had been stabbed with a cold blade. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of silence, she looked back at her wrist. "When?"_

_Wade looked as sick and as pale as Kim felt as he chewed his lip, "The pictures are two days old. GJ says it's going down tonight, under the cover of the new moon."_

_Shego had been right there? Just a few miles away? And had not called? Not even to let Ron and Yori know she was close by in case of an emergency? She was their blood donor on call!_

_All the recriminations swam in her head… old rumors suddenly seemed like cold hard facts. The nights Shego came in late smelling of ozone when she said she was just going to the bar. The times she seemed to have money even though she and Kim did mostly pro bono work. The jade green Ferrari she drove that was entirely paid off in her name._

_Standing up, the redhead glared at her right ring finger. In a fit she twisted the Columbian emerald ring off of it and hurled it away. Bitterly she went to the closet and pulled out her heaviest gear, including the old grapple gun she used when she knew she was in for a fight and would need more than the fifty feet in the kimmunicator watch._

"_I'm on my way."_

**-M.A.-**

_The sloth got Kim to the bridge in just five minutes, leaving her little time to herself to digest what the GJ documents had said. She parked off the road and used the grapple gun to quickly let herself down into the canyon below. _

_Retracting it with a resounding clank and holstering the weapon, she began looking, and smelling, for her former lover. She could pick up the faint scent of ozone on the air… but tonight she wasn't certain if that was from Shego, or from the impending storm. Still, she followed it up the canyon towards the dam. _

_There came a petulant flash of lightning from the dry but roiling sky, and it allowed Kim to see the target of her cold anger. _

_Shego was there, crouched along the concrete lip of the emergency spillway above the water. Kim moved closer even as the wind began to howl up the canoyn, and called out to the taller woman._

"_Shego! Come down from there!"_

"_I can't do that Kimmie!" came a barked reply against the wind. "I have to wrap this up quickly!"_

_Another flash of lightning revealed to the redhead that Shego was crouched down over something, working furiously away at it. Obviously the bomb Global Justice had mentioned. _

"_Damnit I said Stop!" the redhead screamed out even as the first few raindrops began to patter on her face and shoulders._

_The hard language obviously got Shego's attention, because the next lightning flash revealed she had stood and turned, and was looking at her lover. _

_A moment later strikes of lightning were no longer needed to see the tall woman, her coat flapping dramatically at the wind sweeping up the face of the dam. She had ignited her hands as she looked down into the gorge below at her mate. "And I said I can't. And I can't let you stop me."_

_The mud at Kim's feet exploded in a flash of green light and steam as a plasma shot struck home, driving her back a step on instinct. _

_Years' old reflexes suddenly sprung to life. Kim drew and fired her grapple gun at the wall of the dam, and felt the hook set home in the concrete face. She thumbed the retract and flew right at Shego, spinning at the last moment to kick out at the tall villainess. _

_Shego's own reflexes were equally alive, and she grabbed the foot, wrenching the redhead free of her grip on the gun and spinning with the momentum, throwing her away from the spillway and up the gorge towards the bridge. She would have to deal with Kim later, after she finished disarming the bomb she'd found had already been planted._

_She had wondered why Kim had seemed so distant these past few weeks. Why she had taken the FairNews reports aimed against them so personally. She had also wondered where Kim had gotten the money for the new plasma turbines in her Sloth when her brothers had said they couldn't afford to simply donate them this time. _

_And then she had gotten the email a few days ago. That Kim had been playing both sides. The photos were unmistakable. Kim standing in Henchco, talking to that sleeze Jack Hench with a smile on her face as she looked over some kind of datafile. Global justice said Kim had grown tired of the attacks on herself and on the world, and planned to take it over and run it right, starting tonight with taking out a U.N. convoy headed to the Space Center. _

_And much to her gut-wrenching horror, she had indeed found a bomb planted right here at the foot of the dam, with boot prints that matched Kimmie's marching right up the face of the dam where someone had rappelled down to plant it, the scrapings at the top of the dam evidence of a grapple hook set in place._

_Turning, Shego resumed trying to disarm the bomb. Whoever had planted it had shielded it against electromagnetic pulse, so she couldn't simply glow the thing into submission; Another strike against her mate. It made her heartsick to think that her lover of the past five years was falling down into the same dark place she had a decade before… but Kim would be a lot more dangerous as a supervillain than she ever had been. _

_She had to be stopped here. Maybe she could get through to Princess after this was over_

_Shego thought she had found the last false trigger when she was tackled from behind. She spun in mid-air to see a furious redhead following her down into the slipway, clawing at her venomously._

_The whirling vortexes swallowed both women up instantly, rattling and smashing them into concrete and debris beneath the surface for several long painful seconds before finally spitting them into the river beyond. _

_Shego was the first to break the surface. She tried with all her might to swim against the current back towards the dam. This failed for two reasons. She was Shego, the plasma fire Go; not Hego, the super-strong Go. There was no way she could fight the current all the way back to the slipway to get to the bomb. _

_And secondly, something had shattered her shoulder in the water below the dam, as well as smashed one of her ribs. She could ignore the stabbing pains in her side, but not the fact that her lungs were quickly filling with both blood and water from within and without. _

_It was all she could do to grab the column of the bridge with her good arm as the river swept her past it, and pull herself up out of the torrent of water._

_Kim surfaced a few seconds later. She was horrendously dizzy, and the only way she could tell which part of the world was "up" was the blood streaming "down" her face where her forehead had been smashed against some rock in the river. Acting on sheer instinct when she sensed she was flowing beneath the Middleton Canyon Bridge, she fired her kimmunicator grapple upwards, and managed to hook the fiber optic cables that ran along the pillars half way up._

_She was dragged, half conscious, up the pillar, and hung there by a limp wrist for several minutes; badly dazed by her concussed skull and near-drowning. At least, her drunken mind thought as she dangled, here under the bridge she was not in the torrential downpour that had started while she was busy being drowned._

"_How could you do it, Kim?"_

_The redhead opened her eyes at the shout that was directed at her, her water-filled ears muffling it as she looked at the source._

_Shego had clawed her way up the same column from somewhere beneath, burning plasma holes in the concrete pillar as she climbed. Her mouth was smeared with black lipstick and blood which had run down her chin, giving her a ghoulish look._

"_ME?" the redhead screamed, and then held her head with her free arm as it rebelled at the effort. "You Knew I would have to stop you!"_

"_You never had to stop me!" Shego screamed back at her, before coughing up a clot of dried blood from her lungs as well as a lot of water, only barely managing to hold onto her handholds in the column. "All you had to do was tell me you needed help!"_

_Kim's arm was burning horribly. With her other injuries, she wasn't strong enough to pull herself up and relieve the strain on the grapple around her wrist, and all the blood and feeling was draining from her arm in the cold and wet. And now the wind was howling beneath the bridge, a wind-tunnel formed between it and the canyon floor that threatened to turn her into a wind sock where she hung. _

"_Of course I needed Help! I had to stop you from blowing up the damned dam!" she screamed back, reaching out with her free hand, grabbing Shego's jacket by the belt to prevent being blown away and to draw herself close, even if it meant the villainess could again attack her._

"_What do you mean me?" The ex-villainess yelled back, reflexively reaching out, grabbing Kim around the waist with her good arm and leaving her weakened, half-healed arm to support her. "You're the one who rappelled down the Dam and set a bomb to take out the convoy!"_

_Even over the wind and the rain, and the noise of the rushing water below, they could both feel the column they clung to vibrating. Looking up between the two lanes of the bridge, they could just make out the tops of armored vehicles as they passed. It was the convoy from the United Nations, a minute or two ahead of schedule._

"_Well, at least that's safe." Both women bemoaned to themselves, before looking at each other. _

"_Jinx! You owe me a soda!" the redhead called out above the noise._

"_Fuck your soda!" Shego gritted out, her arm growing tired and her feet barely retaining their hold on the other hand-holds beneath them. "Why did Global Justice tell me you were going to blow up the dam?"_

"_Me?" Kim barked out in disbelief, "They told Wade that you were being paid to take out the convoy for some big villain group!"_

"_I think someone fucked up royally, Princess!" Shego groaned loudly as she held on tightly to the column with her bad arm and the half-limp heroine with her good one. "I was told you wanted to take over the world and the first step was the convoy!"_

_Both women realized they had been given bad information, and had let their own insecurities lead them astray from there. _

"_Let's get the fuck out of here!" Shego cried out finally. "You retract, I'll climb!"_

_Shego tried to lift herself up with her bad arm, anchored into the column face, but found the half-healed shoulder joint just couldn't lift her weight any higher. She was stuck for the moment, until her body caught up its self-repair duties. _

_Kim tried three times to reach up for the controls on her kimmunicator, but her arm and shoulder had both gone numb, and the only thing she could do was hang there like a dead weight until Shego could climb up and work the controls for her. _

_And then the partially defused bomb at the foot of the dam detonated._

_Kim looked to Shego, ignoring the onrushing wall of water, pulling herself closer against the noise._

_Shego looked to Kim, reaching up with her good hand and wiping the blood and hair away from the woman's split forehead._

_The two held each other tightly, embracing as their world ended._

_**-M.A.-**_

"My father-in-law says they found their bodies two days later, after the flood subsided." Mrs. Barkin sighed, shaking her head, "Still clinging to each other."

Looking up, she rubbed her face, "Wade and Ron… that's Mayor Load and Governor Stoppable to you two… Figured out what had happened. Two different divisions of Global Justice Intelligence, working independently of each other to prevent intelligence overlap, had come to different conclusions about who had planted the bomb, and contacted the one person they thought could best handle the situation."

Tommy looked at the glove inside the baggie in his hand. He realized now where the blood came from. After a long, silent moment, he looked up again, "S- so… what happened after?"

"Well, Global Justice collapsed under the ensuing investigation. Kim and Shego were buried quietly in the local cemetery, and their families refused for any statues be raised for them, saying that Kim would have hated such a thing done in her honor, and Shego never would have found a statue big enough to suit her ego. It turned out that WEE had hired a Hechco bombardier to plant the bomb. Neither organization survived very long after both team Go and the Monkey Master went after them with a take-no-prisoners mandate."

"And… zhe ghost story?" Anya licked her lips, putting together the maiden name of the county Sheriff, Joss Possible, with Tommy's description she now realized was of Kim Possible, whose face was on every town letter head and on a bronze plaque in each of half a dozen buildings in the area.

"Supposedly, over the past fifty years or so… the Angels of Middleton Canyon have been seen in and around this bridge. It survived the flood you know." The deputy supplied after a moment. "A light and a dark angel, helping hikers get out of the gorge in the winter, saving drag racers and base jumpers in the summer, chasing out poachers… But always disappearing just before anyone comes to the rescue."

"Vell, my love…" Anya sighed, kissing Tommy's damp, mussed hair and holding him even more tightly, "In Capitalist America, Angels Guard You."

**End**


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